Modern Times

...Full of shrewd and—for the most part—morally unexceptionable observations, the book seems the work of someone who thinks the way sensible people are supposed to and who possesses a mind noticeably finer than one's own but not dauntingly alien or out of reach...

...The "Father" of Salomon's House, the scientific foundation that is Bensalem's principal enterprise, tells the bedazzled Spaniards, "The End of our Foundation is the knowledge of Causes and secret motions of things, and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible...

...Algis Valiunas is a writer in Florida...

...That Bacon is responsible in no small part for our modern condition seems undeniable...

...The Italians have an ungracious proverb, Tanto buon che val niente: So good, that he is good for nothing...

...He was good at what he did, and his prosecution of Sir Walter Raleigh for treason in 1618 earned him particular distinction...

...The queen was furious, and she stayed that way...

...The dedication in the 1625 edition states that the Essays has been his most popular book because its topics "come home to men's business and bosoms," and the subtitle, Counsels, Civill and Morall, suggests that Bacon saw himself as an authoritative adviser on everyday human affairs...

...Even from essay to essay and one passage of The New Organon to another, there are chasms not easily bridged...

...He resumed his legal training, and at twenty was elected to the House of Commons, where he would serve for most of his life...

...Yet the more we triumph over nature, the more distant appears the religious premise of his undertaking...

...The most obvious excellence of the Essays is this sort of gemlike utterance, cut and polished to a high gloss, though the diction is usually simple and the syntax straightforward...

...It is true that a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion," he writes in "Of Atheism...

...Friendship has its pitfalls, especially for men ambitious of high place...

...Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished," he avers...

...Bacon was not altogether blind to the spiritual dangers with which science would confront us, but he pressed onward nevertheless with abandon...

...According to John Aubrey's classic account of Bacon's death—Aubrey had it from Thomas Hobbes, who had been Bacon's secretary—the passion for knowledge killed Bacon...

...Jardine and Stewart conclude that his loyalty to the queen was not misplaced...

...The better off the body is, the more painful seem the ills it continues to suffer, the more urgent the pleasures it does not enjoy, and the less we concern ourselves with the needs of the soul...

...Montaigne describes things as they are concentrated within himself, and he always remains his own principal subject...

...The plot fizzled, and Essex was tried for treason...

...The Ben-salemites are such godly souls, their ever-growing powers present no danger...

...At twelve, Bacon went off to study at Trinity College, Cambridge, where, the story goes, he developed his antipathy toward Aristotle...

...Yet the question remains whether we actually live the sort of life Bacon desired for his descendants under the new dispensation of modern knowledge...

...let us go on with this, for this is in our power...

...Two recent books about Bacon point out the fissures in his nature...

...It is such a pleasure that he devotes an entire page to a catalogue of trees, fruits, and flowers, as though he enjoyed the edenic pleasure of naming the things God had made...

...In The Great Instauration, the introductory section of The New Organon, the philosopher does what one so rarely sees philosophers doing: He prays, asking that God "vouchsafe through my hands to endow the human family with new mercies...

...The same cannot be said of the rest of us...

...With Elizabeth's death in 1603, opportunities opened up for Bacon...

...And so do we...

...Of Gardens" begins, "God Almighty first planted a Garden...

...And one of the doctors of Italy, Nicholas Machiavel, had the confidence to put in writing, almost in plain terms, That the Christian faith had given up good men in prey to those that are tyrannical and unjust...

...A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds...

...Essex went to the scaffold...

...One essay considers the fundamental Machiavellian precept that it can be bad to be too good: Errors indeed in this virtue of goodness or charity may be committed...

...Doggedly ambitious, he rose as high in the legal profession as a man could go: the lord chancellorship of England...

...It looks, in fact, not very different from the original Fall as Bacon describes it: "It was the ambitious and proud desire of moral knowledge to judge of good and evil, to the end that man may revolt from God and give laws to himself, which was the form and manner of the temptation...

...On a cold Easter Sunday in 1626, as he was going for a carriage ride, the thought occurred to him that flesh might be preserved by refrigeration as well as by salt...

...But his three years in Paris came to an end with his father's death, and—as Nicholas Bacon did not provide for Francis in his will— he was obliged to earn his living...

...Hope is indispensable to the propagation of Bacon's new faith, which impetuous and cautious men alike will eagerly embrace: "There is hope enough and to spare, not only to make a bold man try, but also to make a sober-minded and wise man believe...

...And yet, it's equally undeniable that he wanted a place for the soul in the new order and was not quite able to shed the beliefs of the old world from which his modern children would make their break...

...Zagorin rightly declares that Bacon's political career "had a significant effect," giving to his thought "its extreme worldliness, its markedly prudential character, and its preoccupation with success and the creation of one's own fortune...

...Impatient to test his idea, he procured a chicken, and stuffed the carcass with snow from the ground...

...His father Nicholas made his way from modest beginnings to be Queen Elizabeth's lord keeper of the Great Seal...

...In The Advancement of Learning, he frankly advocates euthanasia, as though it were the most natural thing in the world...

...The religious basis of Bacon's blessed science crumbled, because it was flawed to begin with...

...Nature to be commanded must be obeyed...

...Bacon is given to displaying the finely wrought products of considerable offstage thought...

...Abortion, euthanasia, genetic engineering: Power over life and death belongs to us more and more, and we act as though we know what to do with it...

...Hope is the necessary antidote to this inertia, and Bacon sees cause for hope everywhere...

...But Bacon wasn't Machiavellian through and through...

...Notebooks from this period show him scheming and maneuvering to rise even higher...

...An assistant declared in admiration "that though his fortune may have changed, yet I never saw any change in his mien, his words, or his deeds toward any man: but he was always the same, both in sorrow and in joy, as a philosopher ought to be...

...I am now therefore to speak touching hope, especially as I am not a dealer in promises, and wish neither to force nor to ensnare men's judgments, but to lead them by the hand with their good will...

...Francis was born in 1561, and the queen made much of the clever young boy, calling him her "little lord keeper...

...Salisbury grew wary of his cousin's ambition, and kept him in his place...

...Their version, like Aubrey's, has a fetching moral shapeliness, and it is just plausible enough to unsettle, if not to dislodge, Aubrey's as the tale of choice...

...Bacon pocketed £1,200, a handsome piece of change, from the fines levied on the conspirators whose lives were spared...

...anything men can do, they will do...

...Essex failed to get the job done, and, when against the queen's express command he came back to London to explain himself, she turned into his implacable enemy...

...Machiavelli was more Bacon's type...

...Montaigne presents his thought on the move, reveals himself in the process of finding out what he thinks...

...In Bacon's Christian worldliness, there was always more worldliness than Christianity...

...One can think of the Essays as a kind of self-help book in the Machiavellian style: Here, help yourself—to wealth, power, honors, as much as you can manage to pick up and carry home...

...Not even Essex's patronage could alter the queen's acquired distaste for Bacon, but the rising star did what he could for his protégé, and they might even be said to have become something like friends...

...Talent and tenacity were in the blood...

...The author of the Essays sounds quite unlike the author of The New Organon, as though each book . were written by a part of Bacon that the other parts were unaware of...

...When the queen sought parliamentary approval for onerous new taxes in 1593, Bacon spoke out in opposition, suggesting that the levy be parceled out in six years rather than three...

...Men have made numerous discoveries by accident, so imagine what they will discover "when they apply themselves to seek and make this their business...

...When Bacon is placed alongside that other great Renaissance essayist, Michel de Montaigne, one perceives above all how different they are...

...Bacon was a man of parts, and the parts did not always add up to a coherent whole...

...expanded in Bacon's most ambitious work, The New Organon, the thought runs, "Human knowledge and human power meet in one...

...But even the benefits science has brought us are troubling...

...The contemplative life Aristotle esteemed as the highest good no longer seems good enough...

...In 1621 he was charged with taking bribes...

...Zagorin condemns Bacon's role in Essex's prosecution as "a sign of moral coarseness and a deficient sense of personal honor...

...In The New Organon, the word hope is reiterated endlessly...

...His cousin Lord Salisbury was James I's leading minister, and Bacon made all he could of the connection, suing with tireless humility for advancement...

...In 1606 he married, unabashedly for money (his bride was thirteen years old, while he was forty-five and very likely homosexual...

...The Fall, he writes, cost man "his innocency and . . . his dominion over nature," but both losses "can even in this life be in some part repaired...

...Bacon knew he was cut out for great things, but he had a hard time convincing others...

...To mention things like that would never have occurred to Bacon, and one suspects that he must have thought of the unbuttoned Montaigne as a man of little dignity, even a boor or a clown...

...Once again Bacon deftly attached himself to the royal favorite, Sir George Villiers, who would become Duke of Buckingham, and who would control the court's patronage...

...His protests that he had followed his conscience failed to mollify her...

...As Jardine and Stewart point out, Bacon seemed blithely unaware that "what he did to others could, in time, be done to him...

...But before Bacon is through, the principal Christian virtues that attend charity—that is, faith and hope— will undergo a notable transformation, so that it seems he is laying the foundation for a new religion altogether...

...And indeed it is the purest of human pleasures...

...The Father pointedly does not say "all good things possible...

...Once, hearing that the king had just denied his petition, he returned to the work he had interrupted, telling his secretary, "Well, Sir, yon business won't go on...

...men get to decide the uses to which things shall be put...

...Montaigne is more to the twentieth-century taste, for he has created the taste by which he is appreciated...

...The critical study Francis Bacon, by Perez Zagorin, is a largely sound and sensible introduction to Bacon's thought, but it papers over the gap that sometimes opens between his scientific boldness and his Christian piety...

...In 1599 Essex led an expedition to try to quell the rebellion in Ireland led by the Earl of Tyrone...

...Neither are the causes of which he speaks the Aristotelian first causes, the natural ends for which each thing is made...

...Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man...

...and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule...

...Convicted, he was fined the enormous sum of £40,000, prohibited from public office, and forbidden to come within twelve miles of the court...

...Bacon writes for those who want to move the world...

...Of course, the ascendancy of human power that Bacon trumpeted has come—in our own time—to look less like the golden age he promised...

...Reverence for justice and love of beauty lead to God...

...that is, in raising it regularly up from experience and building it afresh, which no one (I think) will say has yet been done or thought of...

...Yet Bacon's is a complicated, even a compromised, faith...

...Seeing the machine guns and mustard gas of World War I, Albert Einstein suggested that our technological know-how is like an ax in the hands of a psychopath...

...A man that is young in years may be old in hours, if he have lost no time," he adds...

...The story is more complicated than Zagorin allows...

...And how are we to fit in the fact that Bacon was also a political man, active in the highest reaches of English public life...

...But when Salisbury died in 1612, Bacon assailed the king with importunities, and in 1613 James made him attorney general...

...The chief reason so little progress has been made in the sciences is that men despair of knowing what they must in order to improve their lot...

...Bacon's scientific project claims to begin in Christian belief...

...The new faith is in scientific advance without limit, and the hope is in the future that man will make for himself...

...Indeed science, Bacon predicts, ensures the triumph of religion: "Only let the human race recover that right over nature which belongs to it by divine bequest, and let power be given it...

...We have inherited Bacon's faults along with his "new mercies...

...She kept him around court, but the choice positions he sought would not come his way during her lifetime...

...This is perilous ground...

...Fawning, groveling, and toadying, Bacon continued to work his way up: privy councilor in 1616, lord keeper of the Great Seal in 1617, lord chancellor in 1618—and ennobled with a title, Lord Verulam, Viscount Saint Alban...

...In any case, Bacon showed himself a hard man in a hard world...

...Having taken in what Cambridge had to offer, he proceeded to study law at Gray's Inn until his father secured him a place in the entourage of the ambassador to France...

...Bacon refers to Machiavelli numerous times, almost always approvingly...

...And yet," Jardine and Stewart write, he "turned the sentence into the cornerstone for the intellectual work he had wanted to do for the past thirty years...

...the exercise thereof will be governed by sound reason and true religion...

...He never ceased in his efforts to regain the royal favor, but philosophy was his salvation...

...The biography Hostage to Fortune, by Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart, history professors at the University of London, is devoted almost exclusively to his worldly career, and leaves the reader feeling that Bacon spent most of his time living someone else's life...

...The cold immediately made him ill, and a few days later he died...

...He extensively revised his Essays, translated into Latin and expanded The Advancement of Learning, wrote The History of the Reign of King Henry VII in both English and Latin versions, composed a substantial fragment of the utopian fantasy New Atlantis, turned out four Latin works of natural history, translated a selection of psalms into English verse, and produced a good number of lesser-known writings...

...the former by religion and faith, the latter by arts and sciences...

...The new scientific method of induction will make possible advances that no one has dared dream: "There is no hope except in a new birth of science...

...The temptation to seize mastery of one's own fate is a potent one, and it trumps Bacon's Christianity...

...Bacon imagined that religion belonged merely at the beginning and the end of this project—that if we started with a pious prayer and maintained the pious hope that every increase of mastery over nature would somehow eventually redound to the greater glory of God, then we needn't concern ourselves with the soul along the way...

...In The Advancement of Learning, Bacon insists that the end of knowledge is not mental comfort or intellectual amusement or pride or profit, but "the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate...

...Montaigne writes for those who want to remain unmoved...

...But chiefly the mould of a man's fortune is in his own hands...

...Contemplation and action are to be "more nearly and straightly conjoined and united than they have been...

...Jardine and Stewart refuse to swallow this tale, and they propose instead that Bacon had been experimenting on himself to see whether the use of opiates prolonged human life, and that he had accidentally taken an overdose...

...for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced...

...He was greedy, he was extravagant, he was not circumspect, and in time he fell...

...Modern Times Science, Religion, and Francis Bacon BY ALGIS VALIUNAS If the good of the body—hygiene, comfort, longevity, protection from illness, relief from pain, and availability of pleasure—is the standard by which we judge, then the past doesn't stand a chance against modern times...

...Which he spake, because there was never law or sect or opinion did so much magnify goodness as the Christian religion doth...

...Much of what Bacon hoped for is now the stuff of ordinary life...

...what especially fired his accusers was that he had accepted money and then ruled against his benefactors...

...Laboring for the relief of man's estate, the scientists and physicians who are Bacon's descendants perform miracles like those Christ performed, curing the apparently incurable, even bringing the dead back to life...

...A Renaissance man, Bacon was a lawyer, parliamentarian, and courtier...

...Bacon never gave up trying, and he never again made the mistake of preferring the promptings of his conscience to the wishes of royal power...

...In "Of Judicature," Bacon asserts that judges "should imitate God, in whose seat they sit...

...Whatever nobility, magnificence, or wisdom previous ages might have had, the present is the age of ages—and Francis Bacon is universally acknowledged as its founder, the father of the modern scientific project whose goal is nothing less than the eradication of human misery...

...Among the counsel charged with Essex's prosecution was Bacon, who shone in his role as the queen's dutiful servant...

...The intellectual and spiritual virtues, Bacon's prayer continues, are meant to be joined, and adhering to them devotedly will ensure that "we may not be wise above measure and sobriety, but cultivate truth in charity...

...He was knighted in 1603, and was appointed solicitor general in 1607...

...William Blake found Bacon's Essays so worldly as to be "good advice for Satan's kingdom...

...Stripped of his offices and forbidden the court, he thought only of vengeance, and contrived a plot to seize the queen and overthrow her followers...

...Certainly, in the Essays, Bacon concerns himself with the matters of the world: "Of Great Place," "Of Cunning," "Of Seeming Wise," "Of Riches," "Of Ambition," "Of Honour and Reputation...

...Bacon describes what he has learned of things, but he keeps himself out of the picture...

...He wins us over by the disarming naturalness with which he announces that he cannot make love standing up, that he hates getting his hair cut after dinner, that he cannot abide the touch of his own sweat, or that he is overly fastidious at stool...

...During the early 1590s, Bacon became a devoted adherent of the Earl of Essex, who was establishing himself, through personal charm and martial prowess, as the queen's favorite...

...This seems orthodox...

...The greatest trust between man and man is the trust of giving counsel...

...Time hasn't proved him right...

...Bacon ought to have been broken...

...Knowledge is power," as Bacon's best-known aphorism goes...

...In the New Atlantis, Bacon pictures a Spanish ship's lighting upon the imaginary island of Bensalem, "a land of angels," whose inhabitants are remarkable for their Christian piety, free of any chauvinism or contentiousness, and far more technologically advanced than their European visitors...

...In the five years he had left, a torrent of thought poured forth...